it.”
The scene unfolded. Murphy and the wolves woke up less than a minute after the Corpsetaker was shown to the door. Will and company changed back to their human forms, while Mort, after a whispered tip from Sir Stuart, rushed over to Butters’s fallen body. He worked a subtle, complex magic that made some of mine look pretty crude, and drew Butters’s spirit from the disintegrating tangle of the Corpsetaker’s spell and back down into his physical body.
It took several minutes, and when Butters woke up, Andi and Marci, both naked, both rather pleasant that way, were giving him CPR. They’d kept his body alive in the absence of his soul.
“Wow,” Butters slurred as he opened his eyes. He looked back and forth between the two werewolf girls. “Subtract the horrible pain in my chest, this migraine, and all the mold and mildew, and I’m living the dream.”
Then he passed out.
The cops showed up a bit after that. Two of them were guys Murphy knew. The werewolves vanished into the night a couple of seconds before the blue bubbles of the cop cars showed up, taking the illegal portions of Murphy’s armament with them. Murphy and Mort told them all about how Mort had been abducted and tortured by the Big Hoods, and if they didn’t tell the whole story, what they did tell was one hundred percent true.
Molly and Butters got handed off to EMTs, along with several of the Big Hoods who had been knocked around and chewed up. Mort got some attention, too, though he refused to be taken to a hospital. The rest of the Big Hoods got a pair of cuffs and a ride downtown. Boz was carted out like a tranquilized rhinoceros.
Karrin and Mort stood around outside as the uniforms sorted everything out, and I walked over to stand close enough to hear them.
“. . . came back to help,” Mort said. “It happens sometimes. Some people die feeling that something was incomplete. I guess Dresden thought that he hadn’t done enough to make a difference around here.” Mort shook his head. “As if the big goon didn’t turn everything upside down whenever he showed up.”
Karrin smiled faintly and shook her head. “He always said you knew ghosts. You’re sure it was really him?”
Mort eyed her. “Me and everyone else, yeah.”
Karrin scowled and stared into the middle distance.
Mort frowned and then his expression softened. “You didn’t want it to be his ghost. Did you?”
Murphy shook her head slowly, but said nothing.
“You needed everyone to be wrong about it. Because if it really was his ghost,” Mort said, “it means that he really is dead.”
Murphy’s face . . . just crumpled. Her eyes overflowed and she bowed her head. Her body shook in silence.
Mort chewed on his lip for a moment, then glanced at the cops on the scene. He didn’t say anything else to Murphy or try to touch her—but he did put himself between her and everyone else, so that no one would see her crying.
Damn.
I wished I’d been bright enough to see what kind of guy Morty was while I was still alive.
I stood there watching Karrin for a moment and then turned away. It hurt too much to see her in pain when I couldn’t reach out and touch her, or make an off-color joke, or find some way to give her a creative insult or otherwise show her that I cared.
It didn’t seem fair that I should get to say good-bye to her, even if she couldn’t hear it. She hadn’t gotten to say it to me. So I didn’t say anything. I gave her a last look and then I walked away.
I went back over to Uriel to find him conversing with Sir Stuart.
“Don’t know,” Sir Stuart was saying. “I’m not . . . not as right as I used to be, sir.”
“There’s more than enough left to rebuild on,” Uriel said. “Trust me. The ruins of a spirit like Sir Stuart’s are more substantial than most men ever manage to dredge up. I’d be very pleased to have you working for me.”
“My descendant,” Sir Stuart said, frowning over at Morty.
Uriel watched Mort shielding Karrin’s sorrow and said, “You’ve watched over him faithfully, Stuart. And he’s grown a great deal in the past few years. I think he’s going to be fine.”
Sir Stuart’s shade looked at Mortimer and smiled, undeniable pride in his features. Then he glanced at Uriel and said, “I still get to fight, aye?”
Uriel gave him a very sober look and said, “I think I can find you something.”
Sir Stuart thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Aye, sir. Aye. I’ve been in this town too long. A new billet is just what I need.”
Uriel looked past Sir Stuart to me and winked. “Excellent,” he said, and shook hands with Sir Stuart. “A man named Carmichael will be in touch.”
I lingered until everyone had vanished into the thick mist that still cloaked the earth. It took less time than it usually did for these sorts of things; no one had died. No need to call in the lab guys. The uniform cops closed the old metal door as best they could, drew a big X over it with crime-scene tape, and seemed willing to ignore the hole that had been blasted in it.
“They’re going to be all right, you know,” Uriel said quietly. “Tonight’s injuries will not be lethal to any of them.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me that.”
He nodded. “Have you decided?”
I shook my head. “Show me my brother.”
He arched an eyebrow at me. Then he shrugged, and once again offered his hand.
We vanished from the night and appeared in a very expensively furnished apartment. I recognized my brother’s place at once.
It had changed a bit. The brushed steel décor had been softened. The old Broadway musical posters had been replaced with paintings, mostly pastoral landscapes that provided an interesting counterpoint of warmth to the original style of the place. Candles and other decorative pieces had filled in the rather Spartan spaces I remembered, adding still more warmth. All in all, the place looked a lot more like a home now, a lot less like a dressed stage.
A couple of things were out of place. There was a chair in the living room positioned in front of the large flat-screen, high-definition television set the size of a dining room table. The chair was upholstered in brown leather and looked comfortable, and it didn’t match the rest of the room. There were also food stains on it. Empty liquor bottles littered the side table next to it.
The door opened and my brother, Thomas, walked in. He might have been an inch under six feet tall, though it was hard for me to tell—he had worn so many different kinds of fashionable shoes that his height was always changing subtly. He had dark hair, currently as long as my shortest finger, and it was a mess. Not only was it messy, it was
His cold grey eyes were sunken, with dark rings beneath them. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with drink stains on it. He hadn’t even pretended to need a coat against the night’s cold, and breaking their easily maintained cover as human beings was something that the vampires of the White Court simply did not do. For God’s sake, he was barefoot. He’d just walked out like that, apparently to the nearest liquor store.
My brother took a bottle of whiskey—expensive whiskey—from a paper bag and let the bag fall to the floor. Then he sat down in the brown leather chair, pointed a remote at the television, and clicked it on. He clicked buttons and it skipped through several channels. He stopped clicking based, apparently, on his need to take a drink, and stopped on some kind of sports channel where they were playing rugby.
Then he simply sat, slugged from the bottle, and stared.
“It’s hard for the half-born,” Uriel observed in a quiet, neutral tone.
“What did you call him?” I asked. Belligerently. Which probably wasn’t really bright, but Thomas was my brother. I didn’t like the thought of anyone judging him.
“The scions of mortals and immortals,” Uriel said, unperturbed. “Halflings, half-bloods, half-born. The mortal
